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Serious question. Why is everyone so against personalized ads? I find them far preferable to random ads.
Personalized ads have to know about you in order to target to you. You'd assume the more they know, the "better" they will be at targeting.

This leads to an industry-wide race to collect as much data about people as possible.

This leads to a lot of large, valuable, aggregated datasets stored in a few large central locations.

These datasets create strong incentives for criminals to steal them and governments to abuse them.

I don't want any of these things. I don't want to be known to various sketchy entities. I don't want to be abused. Is all this stuff really worth it to you just so you see some better ads?

I don't even want to see any ads. I simply don't want advertisements to be interlaced throughout my life. And I damn sure don't want them to be watching me back.

>Personalized ads have to know about you in order to target to you. You'd assume the more they know, the "better" they will be at targeting.

Meanwhile you buy a pair of shoes and get bombarded with shoe ads for the next few weeks. Give me untargeted advertising anyday.

Coincidentally, someone who has recently bought shoes is more likely to be buying shoes soon than someone who hasn't bought shoes for a long time
They require people like Zuckerberg and his merry band of stalkers to know something about me. I would prefer them not to.
I don't know if ads have at any time in history been random. Sure they've been coarser and they've boxed more people in as an audience, but they've never really been random.

Really the main question is: what information may be used when deciding what ads to show users? Can that information be transferred or sold? Etc. etc.

That aside, I think there are many reasons why people might be against targeted ads. Maybe they won't even see certain offers because of their demographic or maybe they'll only see certain deals. Remember that a "well-targeted" add from the perspective of the ad agency and the seller is one that will make them money. Hence a well-targeted need not mean that you are shown interesting tech books instead of viagra medication, but instead that you are shown more expensive products in general and even possibly taking advantage of past behavior manipulate you into wanting to make a purchase you might not have made (or even needed). It's not all sunshine with better-targeted ads.

Assume there is an ad campaign for a lucrative new job you would be willing to take. Assume further, that the almighty algorithm has decided that you don't get to see it because the data indicates you have whatever trait. This may be explicit, such as someone deciding that that's a trait they don't want, or it might be an implicit bias of the algorithm itself based on the biases of the people who trained it.
Nobody is against personalized ads. Nobody has claimed to be. Read the article, think.
What is RTB?
Real-time bidding: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/real-time-bidding